BY 1903 THE BERLIN ACTRESS Gertrud Eysoldt was famous for her unusual acting style, her captivating physical performances, and perhaps even more so for her startling work in the most controversial female roles in modern German theater. She starred as Henriette in Strindberg's Rausch (Intoxication), Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, Lulu in Wedekind's Erdgeist, Nastja in Gorki's Nachtasyl (A Night's Lodgings), and the title roles in Wilde's Salome and Hofmannsthal's Elektra. In an essay for Bühne und Welt in 1903, culture and theater critic Marie Luise Becker commented on Eysoldt's seeming affinity for such characters:

In these notable roles Eysoldt became an icon of the modernist theater. Becker also indicates that she embodied many other key points of interest in the modern age. Her description illustrates how the actress could present Nietzsche with a problem encompassing crucial categories including selfhood (Charakter), appearance (Schein), and power (Macht). If, as Becker further contends, men “tremble[d] before the demon of the female spirit” (ibid.), then actresses like Eysoldt became very real incarnations of that fear in their performances on stage and in their defiant existence as women in the social world.

It should therefore come as little surprise that the actress appears as a recurring discursive figure in a range of texts concerned with the interrelated issues of “the modern,” gender, and subjectivity. These were contested categories for artists, cultural critics, philosophers, and scientists, raising issues that frequently divided the German and Austrian intellectual and cultural elite along the lines of conservative and progressive views on modernity.